Humanitarians struggle to claim successes that are rightfully theirs. Two recent books help us to understand why the tremendous achievement of reducing the number and lethality of famines over the past half-century is not well understood, and hasn’t been sustained. Up to the 1960s, the world suffered a persistent drumbeat of outbreaks of mass starvation that left an average of 10 million dead every decade. By the 1990s that number had dropped to about 500,000. Then, about a decade ago, the advance halted and began, slowly but appreciably, to reverse. We are not back to the horror years of the mid-twentieth century, but there’s reason for concern.

A harbinger was the famine of 2011 in Somalia. Daniel Maxwell and Nisar Majid’s exemplary account Famine in Somalia: Competing imperatives, collective failures, 2011–12 shows in shocking detail how and why a needless disaster unfolded. In the light of the return of…